


Remebering the Pieces (and How They Fit Together)

by Jaune_Chat



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Character Study, Coping, F/M, Gen, Memories, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Repressed Memories, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-18 03:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1414216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaune_Chat/pseuds/Jaune_Chat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Months after the appearance of the Winter Soldier, Natasha, Steve, and Bucky are trying to pick up the pieces of who they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remebering the Pieces (and How They Fit Together)

**Author's Note:**

> Huge ginormous spoilers for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. You've been warned.
> 
> That said, I saw it last night and basically wrote this fic in my head in the car on the drive home.

He finds Natasha in Europe. Brussels, to be precise, a tiny apartment whose only compensating virtues are a decent field of fire and three good escape routes. What can be used to get out can also be used to get in; Natasha knows that, and comes home expecting trouble every day.

He doesn’t surprise her. He’s also not trying to.

He’s let his beard grow, covered his arm, hunched his shoulders, done everything he could to remove himself from public scrutiny. Natasha shoves her dyed-blonde hair out of her face and sits down on the chair, letting the shapeless sweater and coat she wears billow out away from the guns concealed in her back-draw holsters. He remains sitting on the floor, cross-legged and still as a statue save for the faint rise and fall of his chest.

Clint’s going to be back in an hour, and if the Winter Solder, Bucky, whoever he thinks he is, has any operational training still functioning, he’ll recognize the signs of duel occupation, even with their basic cover-ups. So. This is a test.

“What do I call you?” she asks.

“You didn’t talk about this place,” he says as an answer. “One of the only major cities over here not on your list. Took me a while to find you.” 

“I’m flattered.”

“Maybe you’ll understand. The files say you’ve done plenty.” He moves slowly, smoothly, pulling his metal hand from his pocket, opening up the gleaming metal fingers. “So much… Bodies falling away from me. One after the other after the other after the other. Blood on this hand, on both of mine.” Both clench into fists, and he looks up at her, dark eyes haunted not just by the red in his ledger, but by the ghosts that could add so many more pages. Ghosts he doesn’t know yet, but knows are lurking.

“Then I know some things. Understand… well, I don’t even understand myself. That’s why I’m here.”

“With him. The arrow-man.”

Natasha fingers the necklace at her throat, a tiny arrow made of cubic zirconia on a sterling silver chain; Clint had gotten it for her from a street vender in New York for five dollars. She told him it was stupid and cheap and then took them both home and made love (love, not fucking, not friends with benefits, not “having a good time”) with that necklace as the only piece of clothing between them.

He’d left for India the next day to bolster Banner’s security detail, and she hadn’t taken it off since. When he’d come back for her three months ago, she’d greeted him the same way they’d left. She was trying to figure out who she was. Clint was a good place to start, once she’d had time to remember the few things about herself that had remained hers.

Bucky couldn’t even necessarily remember at all.

“Yes. Clint,” she says. Not lying is one of those new things she’s working on. It’s an uphill battle. “But also I’m here for me.” She has an urge to touch him, to see if a friendly pat might help. Her training stops her dead in her tracks, seeing the faint shaking in his shoulders that scream to her of a wire under too much tension, metal under stress and about to snap. She wonders if she can draw down in time. He looks up at her and smirks, like he knows what she’s thinking.

“They put me in a box,” he says softly. The shaking stills. “Took me out, put a mission in my head, an objective. Then I came back, they put me in a chair, and took it all away again. Took _me_ all away again.” His metal hand makes a whining noise, like overstressed servos.

“They can’t do that now. They can’t do that to you again,” she says, her voice just as soft. 

“Swear?”

“Fucking right I do.”

He smiles, and she realizes it’s Bucky. Some version, some variation, 2.0, beta, but it’s him. The Winter Soldier had never smiled. 

“I needed that. Remembering hurt. Remembering _hurts_ ,” he corrects himself, and takes the hat off his head so he can run his flesh hand through his hair, gripping it tight enough to hurt. Pain for control; she’s been through this stage. “I wish I didn’t have to.”

“You don’t want the chair back. You don’t want to go back in the box. You don’t want to forget, or you sure as hell wouldn’t have shown up here.”

“No.” There’s a wealth of understanding there, in Bucky’s voice and Natasha’s compassionate tone, and those who thought they lacked either didn’t understand what drove them. “But the arm… They were the only ones who knew how to fix my arm.”

“I know a guy who’s good with robotics.” Natasha offers that without hesitation, willing to pay Tony whatever favors it took. She understood that if your mind was unreliable, if people could pull out and put in whatever they want, rearranging your memories like books on a shelf, pulling out banned volumes and putting in new copies, then you clung to what you knew. If your mind was a shambles, you damn sure wanted to know your body was in top form. _Something_ had to be working right. 

“Stark,” Bucky says. “Steve told me.”

“Tony Stark,” Natasha clarifies. “Howard’s son.” Things are not good upstairs, she knows that, and she doesn’t want to lie to him, even by accident.

“Howard’s son, Tony,” Bucky says, repeating to fix it in his mind.

“He’ll want to study you, see how you’re put together. And then by the time you’ll walk out of his workshop you’ll be a Swiss army knife.”

He runs his flesh hand over his metal arm and nods. “I’m looking for Steve.”

“He’s looking for you. He’s been doing that since he got out of his hospital bed.”

Bucky rises, putting his hat back on, no longer shaking. “I know. I’ll find him, Natasha. I’ll be back.”

“Clint’ll be here,” she warns him.

“Then he can meet me too. Maybe I’ll be…” he trails off, as if not sure what to wish for.

“Maybe I’ll be too,” she says, offering that fragile hope as a gift.

He takes it in a single look, and then he’s gone.

She stays on the bed, trembling, until Clint comes back. For the first time in a very long time, she lets him hold her. For the first time in a long time, he’s in her arms too.

\--

Maybe it’s not so surprising that they end up here. Nor when. The tracks are still there, but the line was decommissioned decades ago. It’s a freezing cold trek over snow-covered rocks and rails, damn near as dangerous as fighting on that train was seventy years ago. 

Sam doesn’t say anything stupid like, _So, this is where it happened?_ He knows his history, and he’s paid attention when Steve and him had swapped war stories; this is the gorge where Bucky fell. It looks just like he remembered, a deep and deadly drop. Steve is only half-sure he’d survive the fall, and even if he would, he wouldn’t be going anywhere afterward in a hurry.

“Steve?” Sam asks instead.

“I just…” Steve stops himself, not sure what to say. The clues to Bucky’s more recent past are mired past an Iron Curtain that never really dropped, a dangerous mission even for him. And what could he hope to find that could help? Drugs? Procedures? If Bucky had any version of the serum in him, he wouldn’t need them to remember. He didn’t need Steve chasing him around with snake oil. He didn’t _need_ Steve at all. But Steve hadn’t needed Bucky either, or that was what he told himself until Bucky proved him wrong, holding out his hand and telling him he’d be there until the end of the line.

He went the only place he could. Go back to where it all started and ended, and pray.

“I know you.” Out of the tunnel, into the gently-swirling snow, bundled up tight against the cold, his voice carries the length of the gorge to where Steve and Sam stand at the edge.

“I know you,” Steve says in return. He waits for Bucky to come to him, Sam tense at his back, his shield suddenly digging into his shoulders and spine. They’d spent months in Europe, touring old battlegrounds and memorials, always feeling eyes on them from around the corner, up above, always watching, waiting, and for what? To be sure? Sure of what?

The eyes tell Steve the story. Bucky, and not. There’s a shadowed uncertainty there that scares him.

“I remember you,” Bucky says as he came closer, closing the gap between them. He raises his metal hand to the height of Steve’s head, stopping a foot away. Then drops it slowly to the height of his chest. “I remember you… smaller.”

“Remember what I said when you saw me after?”

Darkness flashes across Bucky’s face, and his hand raises again. “They shot me full of drugs, they put things in me, they shocked me. Then things started blowing up and you were… taller. You said you’d joined the army. And I put everything away like a bad dream.” He looks out over the gorge. “I pushed it away, I made myself forget.”

“You remembered me,” Steve says encouragingly. 

“They made me forget _everything_.” He crouches by the side of the gorge and puts his gloved hand, his one flesh hand, on the icy rocks. “Come with me?”

“Anytime.”

Sam looks at them as if they’re insane, climbing down a steep, icy-covered gorge over a hundred feet deep in the mountains in the dead of winter. He’s most likely right, but after falling from a Helicarrier or two and surviving, Steve has a different view of danger. Steve is also well aware this is some of the recklessness Sam had warned him about, the kind that messed with your head.

No more than Bucky’s had been messed with. Steve owed him that.

“I’ll stay up here; take the express down,” Sam says instead, jerking his head back at his backpack. He doesn’t go anywhere without the wings now, not that Steve blames him. His shield is virtually a part of him. Tony is nearly one with his suit, knowing a little paranoia in the right place can save the world. Steve had that brought home to him all-too forcefully several months ago.

Steve and Bucky start their descent, fingers and toes jammed into the rock, Steve clinging with main strength and finding his way with split-second glimpses he turns into sharp mental maps for his hands and feet, Bucky following but occasionally pounding out his own handhold with the metal arm. Well, if Steve had been in the same situation, he would give the gorge a few punches himself. Pity he couldn’t punch Schmidt’s damn plane that had almost become his tomb. Maybe it would be therapeutic. 

They’re barely twenty feet from the ground when Bucky stops, staring at a crevice in the wall.

“Bucky?”

“You wonder how I survived? That’s how.” He nods at the small split boulder. “My arm hit it, caught, broke, then ripped off. Slowed me enough to survive the rest of the drop.”

Steve swallows, not being able to imagine the hot pain, loss, the utter helplessness of being at the bottom of this unforgiving place.

“You tried to save me,” Bucky says, looking at the crevice and touching it with his metal hand. “You called out my name.”

“You _did_ save me,” Steve says, and Bucky looks at him sharply. “I was gone back there, in the water, after the carrier fell. No way I pulled myself out of that one. You did. I remember you pulling me up.”

Bucky looks away, back at the crevice, as if desperately searching for the ragged bits of flesh and bone from his past that should be there.

“Fate,” Bucky whispers. “There was a HYDRA lab hidden nearby when I fell.” He scrambles down ten more feet and drops, Steve right behind him. He spares a thought to wave for Sam, the Falcon wings deploy, and he soars into the gorge, landing behind them. Bucky doesn’t even seem to notice, pressed against the walls, eyes searching for the hellhole he’d been stuck in for years.

“Zola?” Steve asks. Bucky’s getting farther away, and not physically.

“I was under for years. The serum kept me alive, then they put me in storage until Zola… He put this on…” His fist banged against his metal shoulder. “Cut off what was left and put this on. Sold me.”

“Not anymore. Not ever again,” Steve says, and he means it. He’ll fight anyone who comes after Bucky with a fat wallet or fanatical cause and murder on the mind.

Bucky stops, his metal fingers digging into the rock wall. “They drug me here. I was bleeding.” Steve is barely there for Bucky right now, just a sounding board for what has managed to resurface in his mind. But Steve'll take it. He'll take anything Bucky will give him. 

Bucky's arm makes a clicking noise Steve had come to associate with him employing all his strength, and a boulder goes flying across the gorge to smash in an echo of pulverized rock. Behind it lies a door, and it joins the boulder in short order. Sam manages to catch Steve’s eye, mouthing _stay or go?_

Steve’s eyes flick to the ground. _Stay._ If the tension in Bucky’s back erupts in something more than violence against inanimate objects, Steve heals faster. And this is theirs, this belongs to the past, this belongs to waxed canvas and diesel fuel, the twitter of Dernier’s voice joking with Gabe in French Steve learned out of self-defense, Falsworth’s accent egging on Dum-Dum’s boasts, Morita’s sarcasm keeping everything from getting too ridiculous, to dangerous blue energy weapons and the fact that that the Howling Commandos were making a difference.

To Bucky’s voice setting up Steve on dates he’d never gotten a chance to take, and both of them being able to fight as something like equals for the first time in their lives.

Bucky brings out a glowstick as they go deeper into the old base, illuminating the place in eerie yellow-green. Doors loom out of the gloom, and are gone nearly as fast, by Steve’s strength or Bucky’s, it really doesn’t matter. The place was stripped a long time ago, bare wires and blank places on the walls or floor showing that HYDRA had taken the time to be thorough.

But one room contains a chair with heavy cuffs for the wrists, and some sort of mounting for a head apparatus. Five seconds after Steve sees it, and a moment later, the glass-and-metal coffin-like structure behind in, both are gone, scrapped without a word from Bucky, no change in his expression other than the liquid gleam that reflects off his eyes.

“I’m not,” he says, into the echoing silence of destruction. “Steve, I was something before this, wasn’t I? I saw it, in the museum.”

Steve’s throat wants to close in a parody of his old asthma attacks, choked by the desperation in Bucky’s expression. God, that he should have to find out about himself from placards.

“You’re my best friend.” It’s the only thing remotely safe to say, the only truth Steve can tell him, and keep telling him until he remembers. 

“Let’s get out of here.” Bucky turns back, dropping the glowstick, charging out faster and faster by memory and dead reckoning, Steve hard on his heels, not daring to leave him alone. At the entrance, Bucky turns and fires a flat punch, missing Steve’s head by a foot and slamming into the doorframe. The metal of his hand makes a ringing sound, and the doorframe crumples.

Sam tenses, but Steve waves him back as Bucky pulls back and punches again. And again. And again. His arm makes a sound like insane chimes as he seems to be determined to smash in the side of the gorge all by himself. A hefty chunk of rock breaks off and suddenly slams to the ground, burying the remains of the doorway from sight, and Bucky finally falls to his knees, holding snow to his arm and making it sizzle.

“I hate winter,” he says, with quiet, passionate conviction. “I hate it. I hated being shut down. I hate being cold because my arm hurts, I hate blood on snow, I hate hunting them down in their country homes, and I hated that stupid apartment we had because that damn radiator would never shut the hell up, and I hated that the girls were all covered up and I hated that you would always get sick and there was nearly nothing I could do about it and I-.”

Steve puts his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, half over flesh, half over metal, and Bucky rises to his feet and turns to face him, shoulders shaking with holding back a reaction of maximum violence.

“You pulled me up,” Bucky says, calmer now. “Don’t think you didn’t for a second, Rogers. You pulled me up. I knew you. I… _know you_. I’m-. I can be someone again. I can be-.”

“James Buchannan Barnes?” Steve suggests, and Bucky actually _grins_ , looking like his lips hurt because he hasn’t done it in so long.

“I’ve been wiped literally more times than I can count, and I still hate that name,” Bucky says, and pulls Steve in for an irresistible hug, his chin digging into Steve’s shoulder as he holds him tight. It's too tight, an unfamiliar action not fully understood yet, but Steve just lets himself be half-crushed. He can take it. “Yeah, I can be Bucky. I can try that.” 

He pulls back and looks Steve over, like he’s trying to remember him all over again. Satisfied, he turns to Sam, who’s been watching with an understandable amount of caution. “Hope I didn’t mess up your wings too bad.” It's not exactly apologetic in the sense that Sam's life had been threatened, more worried that Bucky had screwed up Sam's ability to function as a soldier. Maybe care could come back in time.

“They can be fixed,” Sam says evenly. “You owe me a beer, though.”

“There’s a great place near my apartment in New York,” Steve says, and Bucky tenses again.

“I tried to kill you on television,” he says.

“If we all worried about bad press, we’d never sleep at night,” Sam says, actually rolling his eyes a bit.

A little of the old spark comes back to Bucky’s eyes, and he nods at Steve. “Better be damn good beer, for his sake, Rogers.” His name's a little hard in Bucky's mouth, a tiny hint of warring accents at a mark's name, but he's trying. He is. They walk a little ways back, and Bucky looks back up the wall, at the lip of the gorge high above them, and meditatively grips the stone above his head. “Natasha said she knows Howard’s son. Think he can help…?” He gestures vaguely at his metal arm, over where the red star branded him property of his former owners.

“You’ll have to argue against his style choice, but yeah,” Steve says, looking up at his ascent, then back at Bucky. “We’ll help.”

“Good. I told Natasha I’d see her again.” Bucky pulls himself up and sets his feet against the wall. “Come on, we’ve got a ways to go.”

Sam gives them both a little salute, and powers up, taking the freedom of the air while he can. Bucky starts up the wall, determined to make it in record time.

Steve looks up at them both, and begins to climb.


End file.
